THIS GLASS IS HASH FULL

By Easy Bake Dave

If you live in North America, odds are you will arrive in Amsterdam sometime in the early morning, after spending the overnight trip tossing and turning in an airplane seat, unable to move or sleep. The temptation will be to immediately make your way to the coffeeshop nearest to your hotel, buy half the menu and indulge in a giant spliff followed by seven bong hits and a round of vaporizing before walking right straight back to the hotel and getting some much-needed sleep. But this would be a major strategic error, one you would regret upon waking up at 3 a.m.—groggy, jet lagged and further off the local time schedule than when you first arrived.

Instead, make sure you stay awake until at least 10 p.m. You can (and should) still stop at the nearest coffeeshop to get yourself some much-needed smoke, but only buy a little (there are hundreds of coffeshops in town), and don’t stop there—keep walking, away from the hotel, to let yourself be tempted by imported hash and Amsterdam’s famous pancake houses instead of sweet, sweet sleep. I promise that once the initial fatigue wears off sometime in the early afternoon, you’ll enter a period of sleep deprivation–fueled disorientation that will mix with all the THC in your brain to produce a pleasant mental state somewhat akin to that induced by a mild mushroom trip. Rest assured (but don’t sleep), it will be ten o’clock almost before you know it.

So how to reward yourself when you finally make it to that magic hour? I’d suggest stopping in at Coffeeshop Chocolata for a cup of delicious hot hash chocolate, made with the same connoisseur-quality cannabis-infused chocolate they use in their famous bonbons and chocolate cakes (see March ’05 HT for cake recipe). Feel free to enjoy one of these delicious treats downstairs, where you can blend in with the friendly staff and local crowd hanging around the counter, or take your hot hash chocolate upstairs to a lounge area, which boasts a large window overlooking the city life below. Just be careful if you have more than one cup, as it may prove a lot more difficult making your way down those narrow, winding stairs than it was coming up.